


Avulsion

by Elldritch



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Gen, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Scream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26712463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elldritch/pseuds/Elldritch
Summary: The siphoning challenge, from Harrow's POVFor the discord jam prompt 'Scream'
Comments: 10
Kudos: 66





	Avulsion

Gideon was screaming. 

It wasn’t that Harrow had never heard Gideon scream before. It wasn’t even that Harrow had never been the cause of Gideon’s screams - she knew that pretty much all of them could be regarded as Harrow’s fault, if you looked at things from the right angle. There’d been a time when Harrow had relished Gideon’s screams; Harrow was so full to the brim with bitterness and hatred and anger and shame, and sometimes it felt like the only respite she ever had was in taking it out on Gideon. 

Harrow didn’t know why it was different now. She needed all her attention to be on the task at hand - holding off the entropy field, while simultaneously maintaining the connection to Gideon was excruciatingly difficult, and she’d had to refine her theorem on the fly to keep from being blinded, after it started to strip the moisture from her eyeballs. She hadn’t been able to spare either the focus or the effort to protect her clothes, or even her hair, so now she trudged, naked and blinking, towards her goal. Each step cost her - both in the sheer exertion required to press forward, and in the awareness that each second she took was another second that Gideon was suffering.

These screams  _ were _ different though. She’d heard Gideon screaming with with anger, or rage, or hate, or even pain before. Her screams were always defiant, even when despairing. Now Gideon screamed with a numb acceptance, the simple animal awareness of an unbearable, unendurable agony that she had chosen to bear, had chosen to endure. It was so much worse - Gideon without her fight was Gideon rendered small, and impotent, and terrifyingly fragile. 

Even after 87 escape attempts, Harrow had never truly confronted the idea that she could lose Gideon - until now. If her parents couldn’t rid the Ninth of Gideon Nav with deadly nerve gas, or pure malign neglect, then she was the perfect vessel for everything Harrow couldn’t bear, everything Harrow could throw at her. She was _safe_. No matter how many times you knocked her down, Gideon got back up, so you could knock her down again. Even when everyone else in the Ninth was dead, Gideon would live, and Harrow would never be alone.

Harrow was so scared that this would be the time Gideon didn’t get back up.

The screaming should be a comfort, she supposed. If Gideon could still scream, then she was still alive, still the power source Harrow needed to survive this trial. So if Harrow was accustomed to the sound of Gideon’s screams, and they were only to be expected when siphoning - Gideon had known what she was agreeing to, and  _ had _ agreed - then why did Harrow want to turn around, leave the challenge empty-handed, and do whatever it took to ensure that Harrow never had to hear Gideon scream like this again, and to hell with the challenges, and the lyctor trials, and every other thing that had been so important to her just minutes before?

Woven around and through the sound of Gideon’s screams was Dulcinea’s awful, vacuous simpering. Harrow didn’t trust the Seventh House necromancer. She didn’t trust her as far as… well, as far as either of them could have thrown Dulcinea’s meat-puppet cavalier. The thought that it was Septimus who was comforting her cavalier, while Harrow - as she always did - could only hurt Gideon in pursuit of her own ends, was intolerable. 

As intolerable as Harrow’s conversation with Gideon prior to attempting this had been. What had she even _meant_ , that she’d let Harrow do this awful thing to her, just because Harrow had asked? Gideon hated her! Gideon was possibly the only person in the whole universe who hated Harrow as much as Harrow hated herself - as much as she knew she deserved to be hated. That was the whole point of Gideon; she was the mirror held up for Harrow to see her the grotesquery of her existence; Gideon was a living, breathing,  _ screaming _ accusation. 

In a world where she couldn’t trust Gideon’s hatred, what could she trust? And why was she so obsessed with thoughts of trust, all of a sudden? Why could she not shake the conviction that, without Gideon’s trust, nothing else mattered?

Almost without noticing, she’d made it to the box. She reached out with fingers which were clumsy beneath the stinging assault of the entropy field, but it wouldn’t open. Her sight was still blurred in a way that could have been visual distortion from the field itself, or could signify that she’d done lasting damage to her corneas before adjusting her theorem. 

Gideon’s screams were abruptly choked off, and Harrow closed her eyes, and waited for the end. Three seconds, Sextus had calculated. Three seconds in a universe without Gideon was three seconds too long, and already they dragged. Already it had been an eternity since she had fallen silent. Then Dulcinea yelped,  _ “Ow, you feral!” _ loud enough for Harrow to make out her words, where her voice had previously been a barely-audible murmur, and Harrow realised that the channel was still open between her and her cavalier - Gideon couldn’t be dead. She wasn’t sure what Gideon had done to provoke such a reaction from Septimus, but she hoped it fucking hurt.

She turned her attention back to the box, as much as she could with Gideon still in the Seventh’s clutches. It took several aeons to figure out the trick of it, but she did. It was with remarkably little triumph that she retrieved the key, and turned to make her return. 

Gideon’s screaming resumed, the agonised cries interspersed with choking and retching, as though her body was heaving itself apart. Harrow wasn’t sure how much longer Gideon could last, and she tried to stem the flow of energy between them, tried to keep going on just the merest trickle, praying that Gideon still had that much to spare.  Harrow misjudged, and she stumbled. She didn’t know how she could get back up; couldn’t envision even the amount of effort it would take to crawl. 

She was so exhausted… and then she wasn’t. She was suffused with a rush of energy, and she couldn’t stop to think. Gideon didn’t have much longer. Harrow climbed to her feet and ran as she had never before run in her entire life. She had barely made it before Gideon’s screaming stopped for good.

Harrow fell to her knees again, this time next to the still body of her cavalier. 

“Gideon?...  _ Gideon! _ ”she wasn’t moving. Had that last burst of energy which had propelled Harrow over the finishing line been the final dregs of a spirit wrung dry? Had Harrow killed her?

Then Gideon opened her eyes, just the barest amount. They were bloodshot, but alert, conscious. Harrow had her hands on Gideon’s shoulders before she knew what she was doing, and she was shaking her as though through sheer kinetic force she could return everything she’d taken.

“Ha-ha,” said Gideon, “first time you didn’t call me  _ Griddle _ ,” and died. 


End file.
